The Kindness Of Strangers review: Lone Sherfig returns to the Berlinale with new ensemble drama, The Kindness Of Strangers, a New York-set tale of people coming together at a time of transition and change.
Photo: Per Arnesen/Berlinale
Written and directed by Sherfig, who last delighted festival audiences with her WWII-set feature Their Finest, directs an impressive international cast, including Andrea Riseborough, Zoe Kazan, Tahar Rahim, Bill Nighy, Caleb Landry Jones, and Jay Baruchel.
We open to Kazan’s Clara, a married mother of two from Buffalo, who wakes her two young sons early one morning. She’s seen leaving the family home and heading for a parked car outside with little-to-no belongings, and it is immediately obvious that the young woman is leaving her house, and breaking away from her sleeping husband, policeman Richard (Esben Smed), who has been abusive and physical during the recent months and years of their relationship. Clara Heads to Manhattan, having always promised to take the two boys, Anthony (Jack Fulton) and Jude (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong ), to the sprawling metropolis in the past.
There’s also recent paroled criminal Marc (Tahar Rahim), and his lawyer ‘friend’ John Peter (Jay Baruchel), who both attend ‘forgiveness’ classes hosted by Andrea Risborough’s Alice, a thirty-something singleton who juggles time at the church hall where the meetings take place and her full-time job of an emergency room worker. Marc has a chance meeting with local businessman Timofey (Bill Nighy) at a local Russian restaurant, the New York Winter Garden, a place also frequented by Alice, usually alone. He scores a full-time job as a manager hoping to push the potential of the joint, after impressing Timofee and his duo of Russian investors. Then there’s Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones), a young man struggling to hold down a full-time job. He loses one at a local mattress wholesaler due to incompetence – throwing a chair through a closed window as he exits the building, and then another, a series of events which renders him broke and ultimately homeless.
Sherfig’s film slowly brings all these characters together, the group bound by rather unfortunate circumstances in almost reverse serendipity fashion.
The Kindness Of Strangers is certainly an interesting choice for an opening gala. In recent years, the Berlinale has picked very different films to kick off proceedings – just last year we had Wes Anderson’s Isle Of Dogs, and before that true story Django (the story of the Belgian-born Romani-French jazz guitarist), and then in 2016 the Coen brothers’ celebrated Hollywood pastiche Hail Caeser! This film certainly has the acting talent on display for a big opening film, but the subject, the story and its unusual and somewhat bland offerings work very much against it.
The cast, however, are mostly excellent. Bill Nighy brings a very different character to the screen comparing it to the parts he’s played before. His quirky humour does shines through, and he does deliver most of the film’s most welcomed lighter moments. Andrea Riseborough is also on form (though when is she not?), as is Tahir Rahim, but Zoe Kazan is the clear stand-out as the down on her luck housewife, void of cash and credit cards, forced to root through bins and shoplift to feed her two young sons.
It’s depressing stuff, the story flitting from one character to another, each one of having their own individual crisis. The issue is that everything feels oh so forced, the sliding doors nature of the narrative very artificial and a little bit clichéd. The idea of chance meetings from small and big decisions made during life is definitely an interesting one, and one worth exploring, but it certainly has been done better elsewhere.
The bleak, heavy nature of proceedings leaves one feeling rather depressed once those final credits roll, but because of the showcase of talent on-screen, and the beautiful imagery of a wintry New York so wonderfully by captured cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov, The Kindness Of Strangers isn’t completely unsatisfying.
The Kindness Of Strangers review by Paul Heath, Berlinale 2019.
